women in movies

Happy Memorial Day weekend! If your plans include reading, here are some links to get you started.

• Yet another teenage girl has committed suicide after months of school bullying—this time, the victim was 12-year-old Gabrielle Molina of Queens, New York. [New York Daily News]

• Amy Pascal, the chief of Sony studios, gave a fantastic interview to Forbes's Dorothy Pomerantz. Indiewire's Women in Hollywood blog has some of the most trenchant excerpts, including this one, on female characters in film: "They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don't care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter." [Women in Hollywood]

• The Center for Inquiry's CEO, Ron Lindsay, delivered the opening statements at last week's Women in Secularism conference. Unfortunately, he took the moment as an opportunity to lecture the women in attendence about how they're doing feminism wrong. [Skepchick]

• In not-all-profanity-is-profane news: Three women were kicked out of Pennsylvania's King of Prussia Mall when security took issue with their "Fuck Cancer" hats, which they were earing to honor their recently deceased mother. [Clutch]

• Stand-up comic Christina Walkinshaw did a set at an upstate New York casino and was heckled throughout by a table full of men shouting for her to show various body parts to them. When she complained to the club's (female) owner, she was told, "I thought you liked it." Then she was cut from the lineup of a future show. [xoJane]

• And speaking of female comics, 87-year-old Jerry Lewis recently doubled down on his low opinion of ladies being funny. When asked if he had changed his mind since his famously dumb statements in 1998, Lewis said "I am a bigot with no imagination whatsoever, so no." (Actually, what he said was, "I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator," but same diff.) [AP]

• At The Rumpus, porn director Sam Benjamin discusses his youthful idealism about the "spectacular, feminist, clever, ornate" films he hoped to make, and what he's learned from working in the sex industry. [The Rumpus]

• Kathryn Joyce's book The Child Catchers—reviewed in the new issue of Bitch—is a fascinating, if disturbing, exposé of how international adoption has been impacted by evangelical Christianity and corruption. Joyce discusses these subjects and more in this great interview. [RH Reality Check]

This is the last week to catch the Portland International Film Festival, which the Northwest Film Center has been running since February 10th, screening several films a day in venues around Portland. One of the films on our radar here at Bitch was Pink Saris, a British documentary about a gang of women in Uttar Pradesh, India who wear hot pink saris to demonstrate their revolt against tradition and patriarchy. See the trailer and read what we thought after the jump...

It's a Wonderful Life tells us a story about what it means to be a librarian. In this alternate reality, Mary is portrayed as a librarian in order to convey just how bad things got without George around. Mary is an old maid, and in 1946, "old maid" was synonymous with "librarian".

This character certainly reflects societal beliefs about librarians in 1946: that librarians were single, unhappy women. Librarian identity in film has become a bit more complex since then, but Mary's character is still all too familiar.